As I was getting ready for the Texas Folklife Festival 2010, I had a schedule I followed. I needed to be at the Institute at 4:00 for the performance which began at 4:30. And of course, I wanted to be there 30 minutes earlier (3:30 pm) to ensure nothing went wrong, and because I had friends with me so this would ensure that weren’t late because of parking and helping my friends figure out how to get around. So I began to get dressed about 5 hours before I was schedule to leave @ 2:45 pm.

SCHEDULE

10:00 AM – Showered & Towel Dry Hair

10:30 AM – Get everything for hair ready and put hair in initial position with some watered down gel

11:00 AM – Hair (You need even more time if you are doing a braid or are doing it yourself)

12:30 PM – Makeup (Take time to do your makeup so that you don’t sweat through your makeup or mess it up)

01:30 PM – Put on costume and bells

02:00 PM – Jewelry (Belt, necklaces, etc)

02:30 PM – Relax and think about your dance

02:45 PM – Pack the car with the stuff I need and LEAVE

Maybe I am a bit too organized, or maybe it’s just the way my family is, but without good planning, getting dressed for a performance is usually chaotic. Even with all this planning and lots of hours to do everything I needed to do, I ended up running behind schedule. But because it was all planned out and I had planned to leave early, we made great time and got to the Institute of Texan Cultures at 3:30 PM, thirty minutes ahead of schedule and exactly the time I wanted to be there. This extra time gave us the opportunity for me to be dropped off, my friends to find parking in the hassle of downtown, walk all the way back to the festival, find me and the stage in all the hallaballu, and get great seating to set up the video camera! It made my life a lot easier and I was able to stake out a nice cool indoor spot to beat out the heat until the performance.

And to let you know what happened and why I was off schedule. Of course, doing hair is hard. And I have pretty short hair (only shoulder-length) so we had to do just a bun. So, my mother trying to figure out how to do my hair caused some arguments and a lot of frustration. On top of that, we had to start over at one point and my head jewelry wasn’t all fitted with strings. It was a bit of poor planning on my part, but because I was organized ahead of time, when I fell behind with the hair time, and the makeup time, and rushed to put my costume on, I was still dressed before my friends even showed up on my doorstep. 🙂